So I know i already posted, but i forgot to mention one important detail.
We were running into problems with the pathfinding, where a physics object could land in the graph on any orientation/position. The question was, How could we find out the outter edges of the object and how they related to the graph, so that we could tell the pathfinder to block them off.
We came up with a solution and its pretty spiffy if you ask me. So after coming up with some crazy ideas that involved pathfinding from vertex to vertex on the object we figured (thanks Josh) that our problem was the same problem as rendering a line in pixels.
The problem there is that what if you want to draw a line that is thinner than a pixel? You would have to figure out what pixels should be coloured by the line.
Our problem was the same. We had the verticies of the object (ends of the line) and wanted to know what blocks in the graph(pixels) would need to be blocked off so the A.I. walks around them.
Turns out the computer graphics industry has been doing this for 20+ years with an algorthim called "Bresenham's Line Algorithm" and it does exactly what we need.
Yay.
Monday, February 9, 2009
ART UPDATE!!
Hello Everyone! for last week I finished all the Pre-viz and Orthographic for the Scientist, 1st Lieutenant and the Grunt. heres some sample :
Cheers!
Cheers!
Write, Read, Repeat.
For the last few weeks I've been working on the T.D.D.
Mostly doing grunt work like proofreading X_X.
Other than that, I've been documenting the A.I., Josh and I have sorted out pretty much everything you could think of to do with the planning and I've been reading some papers on Heirachical Path-Finding, which actually makes a lot of sense if you read this analogy i found:
"
Consider the problem of traveling by car from Los Angeles, California, to Toronto,Ontario. Specifically, what is the minimum distance to travel by car from 1234 Santa Monica Blvd in Los Angles to 4321 Yonge Street in Toronto? Given a detailed roadmap of North America, showing all roads annotated with driving distances, an A* implementation can compute the optimal (minimum distance) travel route. This might be an expensive computation, given the sheer size of the roadmap. Of course, a human travel planner would never work at such a low level of
detail. They would solve three problems:
1. Travel from 1234 Santa Monica Boulevard to a major highway leading out
of Los Angeles.
2. Plan a route from Los Angeles to Toronto.
3. Travel from the incoming highway in Toronto to 4321 Yonge Street.
The first and third steps would require a detailed roadmap of each city. Step (2) could be done with a high-level map, with roads connecting cities, abstracting away all the detail within the city. In effect, the human travel planner uses abstraction to quickly Find a route from Los Angles to Toronto. However, by treating cities as black boxes, this search is not guaranteed to nd the shortest route. For example, although it may be faster to stay on a highway, for some cities where the highway goes around the city, leaving the highway and going through the city might be a shorter route. Of course, it may not be a faster route (city speeds are slower than highway speeds), but in this example we are trying to minimize travel distance.
"
Other than that the path finding section has been tweaked and little things added. Things are looking good for the hand-in today.
Mostly doing grunt work like proofreading X_X.
Other than that, I've been documenting the A.I., Josh and I have sorted out pretty much everything you could think of to do with the planning and I've been reading some papers on Heirachical Path-Finding, which actually makes a lot of sense if you read this analogy i found:
"
Consider the problem of traveling by car from Los Angeles, California, to Toronto,Ontario. Specifically, what is the minimum distance to travel by car from 1234 Santa Monica Blvd in Los Angles to 4321 Yonge Street in Toronto? Given a detailed roadmap of North America, showing all roads annotated with driving distances, an A* implementation can compute the optimal (minimum distance) travel route. This might be an expensive computation, given the sheer size of the roadmap. Of course, a human travel planner would never work at such a low level of
detail. They would solve three problems:
1. Travel from 1234 Santa Monica Boulevard to a major highway leading out
of Los Angeles.
2. Plan a route from Los Angeles to Toronto.
3. Travel from the incoming highway in Toronto to 4321 Yonge Street.
The first and third steps would require a detailed roadmap of each city. Step (2) could be done with a high-level map, with roads connecting cities, abstracting away all the detail within the city. In effect, the human travel planner uses abstraction to quickly Find a route from Los Angles to Toronto. However, by treating cities as black boxes, this search is not guaranteed to nd the shortest route. For example, although it may be faster to stay on a highway, for some cities where the highway goes around the city, leaving the highway and going through the city might be a shorter route. Of course, it may not be a faster route (city speeds are slower than highway speeds), but in this example we are trying to minimize travel distance.
"
Other than that the path finding section has been tweaked and little things added. Things are looking good for the hand-in today.
Tim Bewick - Week 6
Week 6 was the last week of pre-production. I worked on documenting the texture, polygon and bone limits for the models, memory management for the TDD. I also worked on documenting bug tracking software, tool tips and how the destroyable buildings and debris would work with the construction system.
Hello E!
Last week of pre-production and we got heaps done on the design side, fleshing out all aspects, specs for weapons, enemies and objects, relative sizes of game objects, better cheats, added more to the day cycle to make it more playable, detailed the number of enemies in a wave, time to complete and enemy consistency, revised and shortened the weapon list and greatly detailed statistics.
Below is just a small sample of the kind of statistics that have been detailed
Below is just a small sample of the kind of statistics that have been detailed
| Weapon Name | Weapon Type | Ammo Type | Destroys Terrain Objects | Effective Range (m) | Explosion Radius (m) | Nano-bot Usage / s | Time between shots minimum (s) | Time between shots without overheating (s) | Continuous Fire Overheat Time (s) |
| MP-770 | Machine Gun | Bullet | No | 50 | n/a | 25 | 0.125 | 0.25 | 4 |
| Spartan | Shotgun | Bullet | No | 25 | n/a | 100 | 0.75 | 2 | 3 |
| SR-Franco | Sniper Rifle | Bullet | No | 125 | n/a | 200 | 0.5 | 2.5 | 1 |
| Proxy-9000 | Mine Layer | Proximity Mines | Yes | 5 | 5 | 300 | 0.5 | 2 | 2 |
| B.F.R.L. | Rocket Launcher | Rocket | Yes | 60 | 8 | 400 | 1.5 | 5 | 3 |
Jason - 5th Feb - WEEK FOUR
This week i reworked the whole interface section of the GGD and worked on several other sections, did more work on the sound section for the ADD.
Final Week of Pre-production and AI Planning Intricacies
Well it’s the end of pre-production and it looks like the game has finally taken shape. The GDD has had received some much needed attention; the scope is now manageable, and the design is much tighter. The majority of last week I spent working on the planning system for the AI in our game, mainly laying down what goals and actions are available to AI agent, and to which type of AI each is available to. Evaluation of an AIs perception of the world state was also looked into, and things quickly become epic.
Now, onto production.
Now, onto production.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Michael -Saturday 7th February
"Captains Log 7/2/09"
It was another week of concept art on my side of things. Some part of the week was spent touching things up while I also started a few other pieces of art including some sound diagrams and some weapon concepts as well. I havent had time to turn the most recent art pieces into JPEGs for this post and knowing that there are a few new drawings and also the fact that this blog handles images terribly ill post them in a seperate post soon. As for the project in general... Things are shaping up nicely and despite a rather lengthy yet enjoyable discussion into road cones and the potential for me to play the game in a less serious nature in order to get a few laughs everything is on track for the hand in date on Monday. Im anticipating that ill be working on placeholder enemies in the next few weeks and am looking forward to getting back into modelling in Maya.
So until then stay tuned
-Michael
It was another week of concept art on my side of things. Some part of the week was spent touching things up while I also started a few other pieces of art including some sound diagrams and some weapon concepts as well. I havent had time to turn the most recent art pieces into JPEGs for this post and knowing that there are a few new drawings and also the fact that this blog handles images terribly ill post them in a seperate post soon. As for the project in general... Things are shaping up nicely and despite a rather lengthy yet enjoyable discussion into road cones and the potential for me to play the game in a less serious nature in order to get a few laughs everything is on track for the hand in date on Monday. Im anticipating that ill be working on placeholder enemies in the next few weeks and am looking forward to getting back into modelling in Maya.
So until then stay tuned
-Michael
Friday, February 6, 2009
Its all over red rover!!
And We Are Clear!!!!
Well not quite, but the documents are more or less done. They still need to be proofread and formatted but they are content complete aside from one or two elements.
Or TDD is roughly a whopping 160 pages of pure technical excellence. Our GDD is coming in at a close second place with a little over 100 pages and we even have a pretty looking ADD filled with shiny pictures.
oh and uh, just to throw it out there. Our games name may have changed
from Nightfall to Last Light. We will keep you posted.
The documents are due on Monday at 5.00pm so until then
ciao
Well not quite, but the documents are more or less done. They still need to be proofread and formatted but they are content complete aside from one or two elements.
Or TDD is roughly a whopping 160 pages of pure technical excellence. Our GDD is coming in at a close second place with a little over 100 pages and we even have a pretty looking ADD filled with shiny pictures.
oh and uh, just to throw it out there. Our games name may have changed
from Nightfall to Last Light. We will keep you posted.
The documents are due on Monday at 5.00pm so until then
ciao
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Winding down
The pre-production week is finally starting to wind down and everything is going well. I was away last week so the beginning of the week consisted of myself getting up to speed with the current state of the design. I have to say that Eli did a great job sorting out some of the "iffy" points in the design. This long weekend I will be writing out a five minute playthrough description. Hopefully I will be able to post this by the end of the week. It is probably going to be quite long. Before I can do that I still have to finish putting the document together....joy, joy for word formatting. Anyways, keep posted for further updates.
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